In a game Sunday against the White Sox, Kevin Correia made a valiant attempt at something no Twins starter had yet accomplished in 2013: a start with eight strikeouts. Correia would last seven innings, and he recorded his seventh strikeout to lead off the bottom of the fifth, when he fanned Tyler Flowers. The Twins’ TV broadcast started talking about Correia’s season and career strikeout highs. Correia would work through 10 more plate appearances before yielding to Jared Burton. None of the 10 wound up a strikeout. Correia remained stuck at seven; Twins starters remained stuck at zero.

Except for Minnesota, every team has at least one starter with at least eight strikeouts in a game. In fact, every other team has at least four starts with eight Ks. The Tigers have 31. The Rangers have 27. The Red Sox have 25. Chad Gaudin has three. Nick Tepesch has two. Charles Leesman has one. The Twins, of course, have zero. But the Twins do have five starts with seven strikeouts. The Twins have long had a reputation for putting together pitch-to-contact starting rotations, so in that way what they’ve done in 2013 is hardly surprising. But this year, the Twins have kicked it up a notch. Or down a notch. However you want to put it, the Twins no longer are at the same notch as before. Read the rest of this entry »

A July 8 article in the Sun-Sentinel by Juan C. Rodriguez asked, “Is Justin Ruggiano the next Marlin to go?” The same things that made him desirable to Miami made him desirable to contenders. He was versatile, he could hit a little bit, he was inexpensive, and he was under team control. The Marlins might’ve been motivated to move him on account of their upcoming outfield prospects. The Marlins additionally might’ve been motivated to move him on account of being the Marlins. It made sense to ask the question about Ruggiano, but the trade deadline came and went, and Ruggiano stuck. He made an appearance for the Marlins just Sunday.

Another thing about this past July 8 — that’s the last day Justin Ruggiano had a hit. In the fifth inning of a game against the Braves, he singled to left off Mike Minor. It was a liner, and it drove in a run. Sunday, Ruggiano pinch-hit and faced Minor, and he grounded out. His hitless streak is alive, and it’s up to 42 at-bats. Ruggiano doesn’t have a hit in more than a month. He’s not a starter anymore, but he’s still on the team, playing sometimes, and he probably can’t remember the last time he had fun playing. This streak is approaching a record, and to Ruggiano, it feels like it.

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For all the talk about the Royals, Braves, and Tigers, the hottest team in baseball over the last 30 days is actually the Los Angeles Dodgers. During that stretch, the Dodgers are 21-4 and have outscored their opponents 115-63. And as with any stretch of .840 baseball, it’s been a collective effort of great performances.

When it comes to run scoring, the Dodgers non-pitchers have posted a 124 wRC+, best in baseball during that stretch. On the run prevention side of things, their 61 ERA- is #2 in MLB during the past 30 days, trailing only the ridiculous pitching staff up in Detroit. You win 21 of 25 by scoring a lot of runs and not allowing your competitors to do the same, which is exactly what the Dodgers have done.

When it comes to individual performances, you’ve heard about Yasiel Puig — now drawing a bunch of walks, by the way — and Hanley Ramirez on offense and some guy named Clayton Kershaw on the mound. The Dodgers stars have been ridiculously great, justifying most of the big expenditures the front office made after new ownership took over. Brandon League and Josh Beckett might be overpaid and lousy, but despite all the jokes about the Dodgers reckless spending, most of the high paid players on the roster are earning their paychecks.

However, there are a couple of players in LA who have been a significant part of their recent dominance, and probably don’t get as much credit for the team’s success as they should. So, with all due respect to the Kershaws and the Puigs, let’s save a little recognition for Mark Ellis and Hyun-Jin Ryu.

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Mariano Rivera is in the process of completing a farewell tour, getting recognition even within rival ballparks. Just on its own, this tells you a few things. One, Rivera is on the verge of retirement, preparing to officially hang up his spikes, figuratively if not literally. Two, Rivera has been great. Great and beloved and unanimously respected, but mostly, great. Players who weren’t great don’t get the Rivera treatment. Few players, really, get the Rivera treatment. Fans in other cities are saying goodbye to one of the greatest pitchers the game’s ever seen. Three, Rivera’s seen a whole lot. He’s had a long enough career to establish himself as a hall-of-famer — and to make an impression on every place he’s been to — so there aren’t many things Rivera hasn’t seen, that he hasn’t experienced. He’s given everything he’s had to baseball, and he’s squeezed baseball for everything it’s worth.

Some of the only things Rivera hasn’t experienced are different varieties of failure. He has, simply, been too good, too consistently and reliably good, to fail often. He has failed before, sometimes memorably, but there have been plenty of ways in which he hasn’t failed, and ways in which he never will. At the moment, though, Rivera’s experiencing something he’s never experienced before. For the first time in his big-league career, Rivera’s blown three consecutive saves. He hasn’t been through everything, but he’s been through one more thing than he had been.

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Hey there, and welcome to exactly what the headline tells you this is. I understand that this is the Internet, and the popular corners of the Internet are mostly populated by pieces with absurdly vague headlines that all but require you to click through for further information. Let’s check out the front page of the Huffington Post. Like, right now. A selection of headlines: “Why We Need to March… Again.” And…well actually this isn’t very interesting. You know what I’m talking about, is the point, and it’s obnoxious, and this isn’t like that. This post is obviously about wild baseball swings from the past week. Here’s a link to the whole series, with wild swings and wild pitches. Maybe this could draw better traffic if I spruced it up with something more leading and sexy, but we don’t care about raw traffic. We care about quality traffic, like each one of you. Hold on a second, I’m getting a call from the boss, says it’s “urgent.”

-all right, we’re back, with terrible swings at low breaking balls like always. The window analyzed: August 2 through August 8, which was yesterday! If you’re reading this on August 9. The wildest swings are those swings at pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, and based on history they tend to be swings at two-strike offspeed stuff in the dirt. I excluded ugly checked swings by Darin Ruf and John Lannan, against Jordan Walden and Brandon Beachy, respectively. Those happened in the same game. What I didn’t exclude is what follows. Check it out! You’re already here.

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Hey there, people who wish more days were like Friday, and welcome to this part of the Internet. There are many parts of the Internet, so many countless parts of the Internet, and the Internet is expanding every second of every day. Given the freedom, you can go to pretty much any part of the Internet that you want, which makes the idea of a dedicated audience laughable. Sure, people might like something, but the instant it disappoints, they might go to something else, something that hasn’t disappointed them yet. Because there are infinite options, so many of them with clickbait-y headlines, so why stand for disappointment? The Internet audience has high expectations and an unwillingness to lower them, and it’s a miracle anything ever succeeds over an extended period of time. So thanks a lot, Internet, for causing my sometimes unbearable, unmanageable anxiety. Here are all of the posts in the The Worst Of The Best series. I will do everything I can to keep you feeling reasonably satisfied.

We’re back to normal weekly intervals, now, with July decidedly behind us. What you’re going to see are the wildest pitches from between August 2 and August 8, as determined by distance from the center of the strike zone, as determined by mathematical calculation, as supported by PITCHf/x, as made possible by cameras, as made possible by magic. The process behind this post, the act of reading this post, the images within this post — magic. There are going to be a lot of images. Some wild pitches just missing this list: Samuel Deduno to Alcides Escobar on August 7, Francisco Rodriguez to Jesus Guzman on August 7, and Francisco Rodriguez to Rene Rivera on August 7. August 7 was a wild day, especially for Francisco Rodriguez. But I’ll tell you now for some reason, you’re still about to see the Rodriguez/Rivera delivery. Why? Felt like it. I’ll explain. Scroll down for baseball.

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Not everyone liked Dave Parker. Certainly the fans who threw things at him in the Pittsburgh outfield, slashed the roof of his convertible and even threatened his life could be counted in this camp. Pundits who may have poured cold water on Parker’s Hall of Fame candidacy thanks to his involvement in the Pittsburgh Drug Trials might also find themselves in this camp. But whether you loved him or hated him, Parker was always one of the game’s most entertaining and best players, and his recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease shouldn’t overshadow that fact.

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Maybe you’ve heard. Jonathan Lucroy is good at framing pitches. According to Jeff Sullivan’s most recent post on the subject, third-best in the league and the current first-best starting catcher. So he’s good at framing. But he doesn’t call it framing. And when he describes how and why he got good at it, it doesn’t sound like much of a mystery. It’s just the natural result of years of hard work.

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Like most teams, the New York Mets are into the numbers. They may not be at the forefront of analytics, but they are by no means stuck in the stone age when it comes to using data. Ian Levin is part of the organization’s saber-savvy brain trust.

Formerly the coordinator of amateur scouting, Levin currently serves as the team’s manager of baseball analytics. Last week he was part of the scouting panel at SABR 43. Afterwards, he discussed the Mets data-evaluation process. Read the rest of this entry »

To the best of my knowledge, there has only been one Muslim player in the history of major league baseball: Sam Khalifa, a Pirates backup shortstop who played 164 games in the 1980s before retiring following his father’s unexpected murder. (His Egyptian father, Rashad Khalifa, was a heterodox Muslim scholar in Tucson, Arizona, where Sam Khalifa grew up. Sam is now a baseball coach at his old high school, Sahuaro.)

Other American sports have featured well-known Muslims — Nigerian Hakeem Olajuwon and American Shareef Abdur-Raheem in the NBA; Americans Ahmad Rashad and Az-Zahir Hakim in the NFL; Lebanese-Canadian Nazem Kadri in the NHL; and of course, boxer Muhammad Ali has a claim to being the most famous American Muslim, period. (Incidentally, Ahmad Rashad was a student of Rashad Khalifa.) In baseball, meanwhile, while the majority of players have come from a Christian background, there have been members of many other religious minorities, both practicing and nonpracticing, like Ryan Braun (Jewish); Bryce Harper (Mormon); and Khalil Greene (Baha’i). (For that matter, back in 2009, when he was dating Kate Hudson, Alex Rodriguez considered converting to Buddhism.) So why haven’t there been more Muslims in baseball?
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